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Once a character “wields” a weapon, you can determine a bunch of stuff — in my original document I split firearm proficiency into four “ascending” grades (collect them all for better basic damage) — handgun, shotgun, carbine, and rifle.

You start with a d4 for non-proficiency damage, which improves to d6, d8, d10, and d12 with each added proficiency. This becomes more important later.

Single-action is standard (described in the RBA formula above) while burst-fire grants a +2/3/4 bonus to damage rolls per-tier. Automatic fire is tricky.

But confronted with the idea, I think I might actually have “lasers” incorporate multiple types of horrific radiation and such — “gamma laser guns” for example, might deal necrotic damage as you necrotize the target’s living tissues.

Anyway, that would seem to be in keeping with the basic concept behind rail guns. Why not “simply” lump them together? That way we get all of our weird “high-level physics” guns in the same group — “recoil-less” rail gun weapons alternatively dealing fire, force, or cold damage.

Weapons focusing on radiation can have all of the more terrifying energy types like radiant, lightning, necrotic, poison — and even psychic damage when you’re trying to overload the target’s nervous system with something horrible.

It occurred to me that putting a scope on a weapon ought to increase its critical hit damage. Why? Well, taking into account the basic idea that critical hits are a combination of precision and luck, it makes sense that improving one’s capacity for aiming ought to improve critical hit damage.

“The scope doesn’t do you any good unless you use it” comes into play here. Scoring a critical hit retroactively “confirms” that you were using your scope properly — and the reward is better critical hit damage. Huzzah!